Tullibee

The Restaurant

Tullibee opened in 2016 as the signature restaurant of the Hewing Hotel - the boutique conversion of the 1897 Jackson Building at 300 Washington Avenue North that anchors the southwest corner of the North Loop's most concentrated restaurant district - and has run as one of the city's most architecturally distinctive hotel dining rooms ever since. The space is a piece of considered industrial-restoration design: the original timber-frame warehouse structure with its weathered red-pine columns and exposed brick walls is preserved entirely, the floor is polished concrete, the bar is a long fifteen-seat marble counter facing the open hearth and butchery pass, and the dining room runs approximately sixty seats across the main floor with a smaller private dining annex along the side. The room's defining architectural feature is the open-hearth kitchen along the back wall - a custom-built wood-burning hearth with adjacent rotisserie and grill that supplies the entire menu's defining cooking method and the room's low woodsmoke aroma that reads as immediately considered.

The kitchen project at Tullibee has rotated chefs across its decade of operation - Grae Nonas, a 2015 Food and Wine Best New Chef and 2016 James Beard Rising Star Chef finalist, opened the room; Bradley Day, an Australian classically trained in London under Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Gordon Ramsay, ran it through the late 2010s; current chef Nathan Kim took the kitchen over in 2024 with a deliberate Korean-influenced new American direction - but the room's hearth-and-butchery foundation has remained consistent. The current menu under Kim runs from the open-hearth fire as a structural principle: a wood-roasted whole branzino with preserved lemon and Korean herbs, a forty-five-day dry-aged ribeye cooked over oak embers, a rotisserie half chicken with gochujang glaze, a hearth-roasted root vegetable plate with white miso, a small-plates section that includes a kimchi pancake with smoked trout and a hand-cut beef tartare with Asian pear and sesame, and a hand-made pasta rotation that includes a kalbi-and-ramen-style preparation that reads as a quiet Korean-Italian crossover.

The hotel context adds incidental polish: the rooftop pool deck and bar one floor above operates seasonally from May through October and adds a serious cocktail-and-small-plates extension to the main dining room, the hotel's evening lobby bar handles the post-dinner cocktail naturally, and the Hewing's senior front-of-house staff handles the kind of out-of-town hotel-guest dining that the North Loop's more standalone restaurants struggle to integrate. The wine programme is shorter than at the city's senior Italian and French rooms (around a hundred and fifty references) but the selection is thoughtful and the markups are deliberately moderate. The cocktail bar pulls from the Hewing's parallel rooftop programme and runs an experienced cocktail-bar team. For a North Loop dinner that wants serious technique inside a genuinely beautiful preserved-warehouse dining room, the integrated rooftop and hotel-bar context, and a moderate price point that protects accessibility, Tullibee is the city's senior hotel-restaurant first call.